She Came in Through the Bathroom Window

Illustration by Bob Aul Why is it all these Virgin Mary visions just before Easter every year remind us of the preconditioning Jesus freaks employed when they played those supposedly satanic Led Zeppelin records backward? By the time you heard "geel qwing ju nix yick jick," you were convinced you had actually heard, "he will bring you six six six." Kids, don't play your dad's satanic albums backward on that dust-collecting record player in the garage. There is special equipment for that. It's kept at the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) headquarters next to the 405 freeway. Just take Dad's records inside, and the kindly TBN folks will take it from there. They'll also explain why police had to shut down a residential street clogged with traffic after Mary appeared April 10 on a wooden door in a Pittsburgh home. A local TV reporter even saw it, but he said if you blocked light coming in from a window, the image disappeared. Of course, he works for the devil—and we don't mean Rupert Murdoch! If you really wanted a "holey" spirit, you had to go to a Lagos Air Force base crapper, where a woman saw an apparition of Mary on April 11. That sparked a pilgrimage to the restroom window, where the Blessed Mother gave instructions on faith, crowd control and spraying Glade air freshener because—Jeezuz Christ!—it smelled like something musta crawled up inside someone and died.

MARY, MARY: WHERE YOU GO-GOING TO? One place thou shalt not see Mother of God visions is on the Go-Go's website. On April 16, the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights lashed out at the five gals from the '80s new wave band for appearing on their home page dressed as the Virgin Mary to promote their new CD, God Bless the Go-Go's. Kids, don't try to play the CD backward on that dusty record player. Take it to TBN. They're expecting you.

PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS South Orange County water officials are so worried about having to rely on imported water that they are pondering turning seawater into drinking water, according to the April 17 Orange County Register. Central County water officials have already decided to replace the imported stuff with treated human sewage. Considering the number of sewage spills into our ocean—there were 20 and counting at press time, a pace that should shatter last year's record of 40 offshore poopings—drinking seawater should already be just like drinking human waste.

TELL ME WHY? On April 17, the Board of Prison Terms for the third time denied parole to Brenda Spencer, who is serving 25 years to life for killing two people and wounding nine in the nation's first schoolyard shooting way back in 1979—when schoolyard shootings meant something, man! Spencer was immortalized in the '80s new wave band the Boomtown Rats' song "I Don't Like Mondays," which was banned in her hometown of San Diego. Asked at the time of the shootings why she did it, the remorseless 16-year-old said it was because she didn't like Mondays. Now she says she deeply regrets her actions and feels partially responsible for the spate of schoolyard shootings that have followed. That didn't sway the board, which heard from the mother of a Santana High School shooting victim. Could so many of these incidents taking place in the San Diego area have something to do with an atmosphere that produces sentiments like those expressed on April 20 by San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Joseph Perkins? He trashed Us Weekly's cover story on single moms because it "sends a decidedly harmful message to the millions of impressionable young women who look up to them with admiration" and decide that this "lifestyle choice" is okay. He named Today Show co-host Katie Couric as a single mom by choice. Her choice: she married a guy who died of cancer and left her alone to raise the kids. The bitch! Spencer lived with her dad, who bought the rifle she fired out of a window in her house. Too bad a vision of the Virgin Mary wasn't staring back at her that fateful day.